Mary Elizabeth Burton 1865-1944
Inspirational Gardener and Horticulturalist
Mary’s parents were Scottish: Eliza Shiells from Edinburgh and William Paton Burton, architect and artist born in Madras and educated in Edinburgh, where they married in 1863. Mary was born in England. When she was seven her mother died and she was sent back to Edinburgh to be brought up by her great aunt, the educational and social reformer Mary Burton. Miss Burton was influential in Mary’s interest in gardening, and Mary looked after her great aunt’s garden at Liberton Bank, as well as her architect uncle Robert Thornton Shiells’s garden at Duddingston Park.
Patrick Geddes, a friend of the family, commissioned Mary to lay out the garden at Craufurd Bank at Lasswade. From there in 1886, she went to the gardens at Mavisbank Institution for the Nervous at Mavisbank House, Loanhead (it became New Saughton Hall Asylum in 1907) where she worked for 38 years. She was engaged by George Robert Wilson to work with the female patients to interest them in gardening . She soon became the Head Gardener, the first woman in Scotland to achieve this position. Her responsibilities increased and she managed a team of gardeners to look after a large kitchen garden, flower gardens and recreational areas, as well as raise livestock.
She used her considerable skills to write pap ers on the cultivation of flowers and vegetables and to exhibit widely. In 1920 Mary served as the Scottish Horticultural Society’s first female president. In 1934 she became the first woman to be awarded the Royal Horticultural Society Associate of Honour Medal for D istinguished S ervice to H orticulture. In 1942 she was the first woman to be awarded the Neill Prize for her outstanding contribution to horticulture by the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, having been elected its first female vice-president in 1924.
Mary’s success was inspirational at a time when women were beginning to make their mark in horticulture by training to become gardeners: Lina Barker and Annie Morison were the first female trainee gardeners at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1897 and 1898 respectively. They started the Edinburgh School of Gardening for Women which moved from Inveresk to Corstorphine in 1903. In 1912 Margaret (Madge) Moffat Elder from Portobello was one of the first graduates of this school.
Mary continued to take private commissions into her seventies and died at the age of seventy five.
Margaret Ferguson Burns
Sources:
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Archives. Probationer/Apprentice Gardener Registers 1876-1835
Ewan, E and Innes, S and Reynolds, S (eds.). The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women: From the Earliest Times to 2004. Edinburgh University Press 2006
Horwood, Catherine. Gardening Women. Virago Press 2010
Reid, Deborah. Mary Elizabeth Burton: a horticultural pioneer. The Caledonian Gardener (2014): 80 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society
Gordon, Pete. FEELING GOOD: Wellbeing & the built Environment. A Talk at the Civic Trust Conference on the 29th October 2014.
Marriage record for Eliza Shiells and William Paton Burton.
Scotland’s People website
